Lisa looked at him and seemed to understand. “God help them,” she repeated.
Hollis and Lisa ate and drank. As they expected, the questions about America began, tentatively at first, then they came in a flood, and Hollis and Lisa found themselves answering two or three people at once. Hollis noticed that the questions were all asked by the men, and the women continued to stand silently. Hollis commented to Lisa, “Why don’t you stand over there with the women?”
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
Hollis laughed.
A man asked, “Is it true that the banks can take a man’s farm if he does not pay his debts?”
Hollis replied, “Yes.”
“What does the man do then?”
“He… finds a job in town.”
“What if he cannot find a job?”
“He receives…” Hollis looked at Lisa and asked, “Welfare?”
“Blago, I think. Gosstrakh.”
Everyone nodded. Another man asked, “What is the penalty for withholding produce?”
Lisa answered, “A farmer owns all his produce. He can sell it whenever and wherever he can get the best price.”
The men looked at one another, a touch of disbelief in their eyes. One asked, “But what if he can’t sell it?”
Someone else asked, “I’ve read that they kill their livestock rather than sell it for nothing.”
“What if the crops fail? How does his family eat?”
“What if his pigs or cows all die of disease? Will he get help from the state?”
Hollis and Lisa tried to answer the questions, explaining they were not that familiar with farm problems. But even as he spoke, Hollis realized that the farm questions were partly metaphor. What the average Russian feared, above all else, was besporyadok—chaos, a world without order, a state without a powerful vozhd, without a Stalin, a czar-father to look after them. The ancestral memory of such times of disorder, famine, civil war, and social disintegration was strong. They were willing to swap freedom for security. The next step was believing what the government implied: Slavery was freedom.
Hollis commented to Lisa, “If we were talking to Martian capitalists we’d have more points of common reference.”
“We’re doing fine. Just stay honest.”
“When do we tell them to revolt?”
“After the vodka is gone or after we convince them American farmers all own two cars.”
A girl of about fifteen sitting on the floor suddenly stood and asked, “Miss, how old are you?”
Lisa smiled at the girl. “Almost thirty.”
“Why do you look so young?”
Lisa shrugged.
“My mother”—she pointed to a woman behind her who could have been fifty—“is thirty-two. Why do you look so young?”
Lisa felt uncomfortable. She said, “Your mother looks my age.”
One of the men shouted, “Go home, Lidiya.”
The girl started for the door but took a deep breath and walked directly to Lisa. Lisa stood. The girl looked at Lisa closely, then touched her hand. Lisa took the girl’s hand in hers, bent down, and whispered in her ear, “There is too much we don’t know about each other, Lidiya. Perhaps tomorrow, if there is time.”
Lidiya squeezed Lisa’s hand, smiled, and ran out the door.
Hollis looked at his watch and noticed it was near midnight. He wouldn’t have minded letting this go on until dawn, but that black Chaika prowling the dark roads was on his mind. He said to Pavel, “My wife is pregnant and needs sleep.” Hollis stood. “We’ve kept you all up long enough. Thank you for your hospitality and especially for the vodka.”
Everyone laughed. The people filed out as they had arrived, in family groups, and each man shook hands with Hollis and mumbled a good-night to Lisa. The women left without formalities.
Pavel and Ida led Lisa and Hollis through an opening in the kitchen wall curtained off with a quilt blanket. They passed directly into a bedroom, and Hollis realized there was no sitting room. The bedroom held two single cots piled high with quilts, but Pavel motioned them toward a rough pine door, and they entered the second bedroom through the first. This was the end room in the three-room log cabin, and Hollis guessed it was the master bedroom. The middle room was for the son and daughter, who would probably sleep in the kitchen tonight.
Pavel said, “Here is your bed.”
The room was lit, as the kitchen had been, by a single bulb hanging on a cord from an exposed log rafter. Heat came from a single-bar electric heater beside the bed. The double bed and two wooden trunks nearly filled the room, and a rag rug covered the plank floor. Hollis noticed spikes driven into the log walls as clothing hooks, and a pair of muddy trousers hung from one of them. There was one window in the short wall that looked into the back garden. Hollis saw there was no furniture other than the bed, though he had noticed in the children’s room a chest of drawers, night table, and a reading lamp. He saw that the partition wall dividing the bedrooms was made of rough-hewn pine boards with knotholes stuffed with newspaper. The thought occurred to Hollis that the minister of agriculture might want to spend a winter month here to fully appreciate the great strides made in the Russian peasants’ standard of living since the czars.
Lisa said to Pavel and Ida, “This is wonderful. Thank you for showing us the real Russia.” She added with a smile, “I’m sick to death of the Muscovites.”
Pavel smiled in return and addressed Hollis, “I don’t think you are tourists, but whoever you are, you are honest people and you can sleep well here.”
Hollis replied, “There will be no trouble if the people in Yablonya don’t speak to outsiders.”
“Whom do we speak to after the harvest? We are dead to them until the spring planting.”
Ida handed Lisa a roll of toilet paper that crinkled. “If you must go out back. My bladder was always giving me trouble when I was pregnant. Spokoiny nochi.”
The woman and her husband left.
Lisa felt the bed. “A real perina—feather mattress.”
“I’m allergic to feathers.” Hollis put his hands in his pockets. “I might have preferred a tractor shed.”
“Stop griping.”
He went to the bed and picked up a corner of the quilt and examined the seam, looking for bedbugs.
Lisa asked, “What are you looking for?”
“Looking for my chocolate mint on the pillow.”
She laughed.
Hollis pulled down the triple quilt to examine the sheets, but there weren’t any. There was only the stained mattress ticking with feather quills sticking out. The things we take for granted. He suddenly felt a sharp anger at Katherine for all her petty whining and bitching about embassy life.
Lisa seemed not to notice the dirty mattress and began looking around the room.
Hollis moved to the curtainless window and examined it. It was a swing-out type, factory-made, but was some inches shorter than the log opening and had to be set in mortar, which was now cracking. He felt a cold draft and saw his breath. Hollis tried the latch handle and satisfied himself the window would open if it became necessary to leave that way.
Lisa came up beside him and looked out the window. “That’s their private plot. Each peasant family is allowed exactly one acre. These plots comprise less than one percent of the agricultural lands but account for nearly thirty percent of the value of Soviet farm output.”
“I suppose there’s a lesson there for Moscow if Moscow cared.”
Lisa seemed lost in thought, then said, “This is like my grandmother described. This is the rural past that the intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad are always romanticizing. The Russian purity of the land. It’s still here. Why don’t they come out and see it?”